Ramblings by Jaya Jha in a world that is neither black, nor white!

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This is how it works here

This is one of the very common and yet a very interesting phenomenon we often see around us. A change introduced in an existing system invariably faces resistance by people. But if the same people move to a different system with exactly the same characteristics, which the changes in the earlier system would have brought, they adjust rather readily and sometime willingly to the changed circumstances. This phenomenon can have interesting implications.

One of the most interesting one was seen in the way the seating arrangement in our mess changed around 2 years back. Earlier we used to occupy whichever seat we felt like occupying. Mess people were trying hard to shift to an arrangement where everyone sits in the order in which they come to the mess (it helps tremendously in serving), but people just won’t comply to it. During the vacation the hostel mess needed to be closed for maintenance and few people who were staying during the vacation had to join another mess, where this arrangement prevailed. They complied to it, but more interestingly when during the last part of the vacation they came back to the hostel mess, they still continued to follow the practice. Rest of the residents returned slowly and seeing that the practice was already in force quietly went by it barring occasional resistance and the practice is now permanent in our mess.

Wondering if it could have some implications for the way Organizational Changes should be brought about, in general…

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About Jaya

Jaya Jha is an entrepreneur, a techie, a writer and a poet. She was born and brought up in various towns of Bihar and Jharkhand. A graduate of IIT Kanpur and IIM Lucknow, she realized early on that the corporate world was not her cup of tea. In 2008, she started Pothi.com, one of the ﬁrst print-on-demand publishing platform in India.
She currently lives in Bangalore and divides her time between writing and working on her company's latest product InstaScribe (http://instascribe.com) with a vision to make it the best e-book creation tool.
Blog: https://jayajha.wordpress.com
Twitter: @jayajha
Facebook: http://facebook.com/MovingOnTheBook